Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

In rural Ohio, the personal stories behind opioid prescription data

for their deadline all-formats report that put a human face on the release of millions of prescription painkiller sales records. They told the stories of people directly affected by the epidemic in Jackson County, Ohio, a rural Appalachian community that received 107 prescription painkillers per person per year at the height of the crisis, according to the data. https://bit.ly/32uXxDjhttps://bit.ly/2YxFSMd

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

For homeless on heroin, treatment can be elusive with no ID

for shedding light on an overlooked aspect of the opioid epidemic: how homeless heroin addicts are being turned away from treatment because they lack photo IDs. http://bit.ly/2uiehAi

Best of the States

No family immune: A top US prosecutor talks exclusively to the AP about a heroin death: his son’s

In the course of source-building in early 2016, northeastern Pennsylvania correspondent Michael Rubinkam had lunch with a local lawyer. The lawyer mentioned that a member of the U.S. attorney's office had lost a son to heroin but had never spoken publicly about it.

Intrigued, Rubinkam asked the lawyer to approach the then-assistant prosecutor, Bruce Brandler, about an interview. Rubinkam had been looking for fresh ways to write about the scourge of heroin, and saw the prosecutor’s story as a powerful new example of how no family is immune.

But Brandler, he learned, was adamantly against going public with his family’s – and his son’s – story. It was too painful.

Best of the States

Libraries cope with patrons visiting them to use heroin

The stories of heroin addicts overdosing in unusual places have become numbingly familiar: a McDonald’s play area, inside a children’s hospital, even while driving down the highway.

But it was another odd location -- the restroom of a library -- that drove Columbus reporter Kantele Franko to identify an additional, tragic twist to these stories. Franko learned over several weeks of reporting that the same qualities that make libraries ideal for studying and reading — unfettered public access, quiet corners and nooks, minimal interaction with other people — also make them appealing places to shoot heroin.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Checking out: Drug users take advantage of public libraries

for spotting a trend in the nation’s ongoing heroin epidemic: multiple overdoses in libraries around the country. The resulting story, which she reported and wrote while working BNS shifts, was No. 10 on Mobile over the weekend and got strong social media use. http://apne.ws/2cwDYSD